Thoughts on Homeschooling

As long as you can read, I personally do not see any reason to not teach your child at home.There are many reasons why. Here are some:

Efficient

SO much time is wasted in public school! Just the fact that the teacher has to teach 30 children at once and answer that many questions takes an inordinate amount of time, not to mention all of the time sitting at one’s desk while waiting for a question to be answered, waiting for others to finish their work to move on, get in line, wait in line for the bathroom, etc, etc, etc.

2. Specialize

Most children are not ‘across the board’ learners. For example, my first child, who is doing 8 subjects in school, has a span of 4 grades/levels within those 8 subjects. She is doing reading on one level, math and grammar on another level, spelling on another level, history and science on another level, etc.

Most children, if allowed to work at their own level in each subject, would fall on this scale as well. This is normal. NO ONE is equally good at one thing as another. That is not how we were made.

However, in public school, students are bored (and making trouble or at the very least, wasting time) during one part of the day, appropriately challenged during another, and completely lost during another. How frustrating!

3. Family

As I have written before, family is important to me. It does not make sense to me to work so hard to have a family (getting married, staying married, bearing children, and rearing children is HARD WORK) and then only see your family a couple of hours each night.

4. Socialization

Yes, I said the ‘S’ word. When in your life did you only socialize with people your own age? Public school! Yes, churches have adopted this ‘only socialize with one’s peers’ approach over the years, and I think this is absurd as well. I want my children to know how to honor their elders, teach children younger than themselves, and get along with all ages. Public school does NOT prepare them for this (neither does Sunday School or Youth Group, but that is another post)

5. Health and Religious reasons actually TOP my list for why we homeschool. In Short, there is NOTHING healthy in school meals (truly) and the Lord tells all throughout the Bible how important it is for parents (fathers, especially) to teach their children (Deut. 11.19). Sending them to public school means they are going to be taught the opposite of what the Word says and then there’s the whole ‘if you don’t see them most of the week, how are you going to teach them?’ question. Even though these two top my list, I am not going to go into them because the main reason for this post was originally to address the frugality of homeschooling.

The main purpose of today’s post started off being about homeschooling on a budget but I felt I needed to give some background first. I will address homeschooling frugally in my next post.

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2 thoughts on “Thoughts on Homeschooling”

As someone who was homeschooled for my first six years in school, I can say that it was a great benefit to me. However, it is worth pointing out that I my knowledge had some pretty extensive gaps (especially in science) that I’ve had to go back and fill in as an adult. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to take a look at your state’s objectives for each grade, because even though children learn at different levels, it can give you an idea of what they should learn overall to make sure there are no large holes.

I agree that looking at state’s objectives is a good thing to do. I am always reevaluating to make sure i am covering everything. isn’t it great that you were able to learn everything later on because you could READ! that’s one thing i see in ‘conventional’ schooling – ALL of the subjects are taught at such an early age that MANY children come out of first, second, and even third grade and beyond not knowing how to read well because of all the time spent on other subjects instead of learning to read WELL. therefore, they struggle throughout their academic careers and beyond!